Some criminologists trace rising crime back to broken families, and to schools and communities that have stopped passing on shared values or building character the way they once did. Restoring a genuine sense of community, and pulling people out of their own self-absorption, could in principle bring crime down – but researchers in this camp are wary of offering that as a single, sweeping fix. They know too well that most popular proposals – harsher sentences, more severe punishment – are exactly the kind of broad assumptions ordinary people reach for instinctively, and that these ideas rarely survive close scrutiny. The book Sense and Nonsense About Crime catalogues exactly this pattern. The criminologist Robert Martinson reviewed a huge range of these programs and delivered a startling verdict: nearly all of them had failed. That finding pushed both scholars and the public toward a kind of blanket cynicism – the assumption that crime-prevention programs, as a category, simply don’t work.
Some experts do propose sweeping cultural change – rebuilding informal social bonds across society as a whole – but that kind of change is enormously difficult to actually engineer. James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, in Crime and Human Nature, argue that crime rose in America in recent decades in large part because cultural emphasis shifted from self-restraint toward self-expression. That diagnosis is genuinely useful, but it isn’t a cure – cultural shifts of that scale can’t simply be reversed by policy. And leaning on formal government reform to substitute for weakened informal social bonds, rather than actually rebuilding those bonds, can end up making crime worse rather than better.
What Actually Kept Crime Low
Part of what weakens today’s justice system is that people who respect the law and avoid crime generally aren’t motivated primarily by fear of arrest – they’re motivated by not wanting people who matter to them to think less of them. That kind of social accountability, not the formal justice system, is what a lot of law-abiding behavior actually runs on – and it has weakened considerably.
People often look back and remember a time when crime was lower, and assume it was because the justice system worked better back then. The more accurate explanation is that informal social restraints – family, mosques, schools, neighborhood ties – were simply more effective. People knew each other. That familiarity meant everyone was, without really trying, keeping half an eye on everyone else, which gave young people real oversight and sharply reduced the odds of them going astray.
This is a large part of why crime stays low in places like China and Japan – not because their formal justice systems are unusually strong, but because their social fabric does most of the work already, watching over young people without needing much help from courts or police. The same pattern shows up in small towns and villages: where the population is small, everyone’s comings and goings are noticed, and anyone loitering or behaving oddly gets spotted almost immediately.
Three Uncomfortable Truths
Rebuilding that kind of community isn’t simple, and it runs into three genuine obstacles. The first is just how insular modern life has become: most people live inside their own world, uninterested in what a neighbor is doing or thinking, unwilling to let anyone look into their life and equally uninterested in looking into anyone else’s. Most people can’t say who their neighbors actually are, where they came from, what they do, or what they might be struggling with – let alone whether they could help.
The second obstacle is harder still: recognizing that no one is really an island, and that blaming crime entirely on “other people” while treating everyone around us with suspicion actually helps create the conditions crime needs to thrive. Treat people as presumptively criminal, keep your distance, and assume their problems are none of your concern, and it becomes a lot less reasonable to be surprised when no one steps up for you either, when trouble eventually reaches your own door.
The third is the hardest of all: knowing what to actually do when you witness crime happening nearby. Intervening directly can put you at real risk. Reporting it to police may mean becoming a witness, and witnessing alone isn’t always enough to matter – much like a student who copies someone else’s exam answers still needs to actually understand the material to make use of it. Working through all three of these obstacles requires cultivating real tolerance, patience, and a genuine willingness to help one another – none of which can be legislated into existence.
Rebuilding Community by Hand: The Argus Story
One concrete answer to this problem is building organizations designed specifically to bring people already headed toward, or already inside, a criminal lifestyle back onto a different path. In 1968, in Newark and the Bronx, two women founded exactly this kind of organization, called Argus. It has been running successfully ever since. Alethea B. Sutton and Mary Taylor, its directors, both had personal histories with addiction and had themselves committed minor offenses in the past – which gave their work with troubled teenagers and young adults a credibility that outside professionals often lack.
Sutton and Taylor believed it made sense to work with both minors and adults, treating the underlying causes as social and human, not simply criminal. Given the right resources and careful management, they believed, this kind of organization could genuinely succeed – and it did. Roughly a third of the young people Argus helped were minors already involved in violent offenses and drug use; many of the adults it worked with had been flagged by courts as needing supervision, often after being abandoned or neglected by their own families and struggling with addiction themselves. Roughly a third had already dropped out of school entirely, and some had no family left willing to take them in at all, their behavior having worn out whatever patience their relatives once had. Argus was, for many of them, the last realistic hope of finding a way back.
The organization succeeded with a striking number of the people it took in. Its method was straightforward: first, it simply welcomed people in, giving them room to become healthier, learn new skills, and rebuild some basic respect for themselves and for others. Only then were they sent back out into the world – and those who struggled to hold on to that progress were welcome to come back and try again, rather than being written off after one failure. Sutton and Taylor were firm on one point: organizations like this shouldn’t exist only for the poor. Middle-class children are just as capable of falling victim to eroding values, hidden poverty, bad influences, and violence, and deserve the same door left open to them.
Done well, organizations like Argus can instill genuinely new values in young people – respect for the law, a constructive outlet for their own abilities, and a habit of helping others stuck in circumstances they recognize from their own past. In effect, they function as an extended family, built specifically to make up for whatever a person’s own family or community failed to provide. Making that work requires supplying, deliberately, everything that’s gone missing from a person’s home, school, and encounters with the justice system.
The real test of a healthy society is whether it can draw its young people inward and align them with its own values – and that is precisely the work most of society has quietly stopped doing. If any community wants to keep moving forward rather than slowly come apart, that work has to be picked back up, and it can’t be done once and considered finished; nor can troubled young people, whether minors or adults, be expected to do it entirely on their own, with no guidance or support at all.
There is little value in dwelling on what people like this have already lived through. What matters more is this: people who focus honestly on their own painful, unwanted experiences often come to recognize just how much strength it took to survive them – and that same strength, redirected, is exactly what can be used to build a genuinely different future.
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